NICO (Nissan Infiniti Car Owners) was founded in 2000 by Dr. Rex Birkmire, a prominent Florida psychiatrist and longtime Datsun/Nissan/Infiniti enthusiast. The venture was originally funded entirely through his personal contributions.
Dr. Birkmire decided early on that NICO would have a key difference from other car forums: Dedicated subject matter experts that are currently active technicians at Nissan or Infiniti dealerships to guarantee competent answers to members’ technical questions. This recipe was very successful and within months more and more Nissan and Infiniti owners joined our boards.
As traffic increased, so did the knowledge base among the membership as a whole. This resulted in technical information that made us attractive enough for new members to want to stay and not go elsewhere once they joined. In addition to professional technicians, much of the original knowledge base came from just a couple of dedicated folks and Dr. Birkmire himself wrote many of our early articles.
Within a year of our founding, Administrator Torry Skurski arranged a merger of NICO’s 240SX sections and The 240sx Car Club of America (www.240SX.org). This allowed that large and vibrant community to stay alive, and enriched NICO with an influx of new members and a welcome spike in youthful energy.
About the same time, a longtime member of the Yahoo Infiniti Owners Club was dissatisfied with the new Yahoo format for its online boards. This format was cumbersome and interrupted messaging with advertising messages. Since many members of the Yahoo board shared their frustrations, it was easy to convince them to join NICO. Within a just a couple of weeks, they moved to the NICO Infiniti sections, preserving much of the friendly community atmosphere that had existed on the old club. Yahoo Club member Greg Childs was brought on as an Administrator soon thereafter.
In 2003, Greg Childs took the reins and began a driven effort to establish NICO as the premier resource for Nissan and Infiniti information on the web, and began developing an entire network of sites. Administrators Nick and Keith came aboard in 2004 and 2005, to handle technical / legal matters and moderator relations / management, respectively. Rounding out the Administrative team in 2006 was Matt Moody, a long-time member and gifted web designer, who gave NICO its unique and impressive look.
Over the next decade, our membership has grown exponentially. NICO has since incorporated forums for owners of all types of Nissan, Datsun and Infiniti vehicles, and the result has been an active, thriving community of enthusiasts who are passionate about their club. In addition, due to our explosive growth, NICO attracted well-respected advertisers eager to cater to the membership of such a large forum. NICO’s advertisers have all been carefully selected, and with NICO the number one-ranked Nissan resource on Big-Boards, they find that advertising on NICO is a great way to reach and interact with their desired demographic.
Despite our size, a friendly sense of community permeates NICO, with many members developing lifelong friendships based upon a shared enthusiasm. In contrast to many other online clubs, NICO has a vibrant event scene, in which many members and Moderators actively participate. In fact, NICO has already hosted numerous enormously successful annual national meets!
As NICO has grown, the original mission set forth by Dr. Birkmire has been carefully preserved: “To maintain a top-quality, family-friendly, community-based forum for automotive enthusiasts, providing valuable technical information, entertainment and the latest news from the manufacturers of these fine vehicles.” At present, NICO has over 300,000 members all over the world. This teamwork makes NICO one of the largest enthusiast clubs on the Internet.
In addition, NICO has issued an open invitation to other Nissan / Infiniti / Datsun enthusiast forums that may be experiencing difficulty remaining afloat due to financial or personnel reasons. Our breadth of resources and our economies of scale has allowed us to “adopt” these smaller sites, preserving their style, history and content, and relieving their owners of the burdens that operating a web forum can present. We have sufficient space to allow for incredible expansion over the coming years, and this offer remains open to any site experiencing such difficulties.
NICO members can access great savings on original and aftermarket parts and accessories, browse our incredibly large Classifieds forum, obtain answers to maintenance and repair questions, research new car pricing and options, chat directly with our advertisers, and discuss non-automotive topics.
We like to think of ourselves not so much as another automotive forum, but as a family-owned and operated car club that just happens to have a website. As we sneak up on 20 years of operation, we’d love to have you pop in and see what’s new!
We’re glad you decided to join us here at NICOclub.com!
